The Calf Pasture Pumping Station at 435 Mount Vernon Street, Dorchester, was built in 1883 to the designs of George Clough in the Richardsonian Romanesque style. The building is listed on the National Register. The Boston Improved Sewage Commission built the castle-like Calf Pasture Pumping Station at Harbor Point (now Columbia Point) as the headworks of the city's first comprehensive sewage system. At the time, open cesspools were common in Boston's immigrant neighborhoods and water-born diseases like typhoid fever and cholera still posed a serious threat to life. The new system connected all of Boston's sewage pipes to a central drainage point at the remote Calf Pasture Station, where giant pumps transferred raw sewage through a tunnel under Dorchester Bay to storage tanks on Moon Island, which held the sewage for discharge into the ocean with the retreating tide. An access way in a small brick structure at water's edge, east of the pumping station, enabled workers to descend into the tunnel under the bay for maintenance. Calf Pasture Station handled all of Boston's sewage until the city built a new treatment plant on Deer Island in Boston Harbor in 1968.

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here.Created: January 2, 2004 Modified: May 30, 2005